![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Despite the hideous cover, typical of supermarket romance, in this case depicting a black-haired Fabio clone in bare chest and leather pants, this extremely strange book cannot possibly be typical of the genre.
While reading it, I tried to figure out if its aura of surpassing weirdness was solely because it was a genre romance with plot elements that (I assume) do not normally appear in the genre, or if it would have been peculiar no matter what genre it had been written for. But I was unable to think of any genre that might normally feature a blonde ninja in recovery from childhood sexual abuse who was trained by a Japanese butler in Hawaii in the late 1860s and is nicknamed Mano Kane (Man Shark)-- there's a long o which I can't reproduce here, but Kinsale uses a bar over the o, which makes it even crazier, though I can't explain why.
The closest match would be Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise series, but those are set in the present day and would not have had an excruciatingly proper heroine whose highest ambition is to become a typist, doesn't know what sex is, and gets saddled with someone else's baby. Though I could certainly see O'Donnell writing the scene where she smuggles a sword out of a sleazy boarding house (where the ninja had previously climbed up into the rafters to hide it, _after_ she had accidentally broken his leg with her sewing machine) by hiding it up her voluminous skirts.
One of the things which makes this book even odder is that Kinsale appears to have meticulously researched everything, even the Japanese and ninja stuff, so there's a sense of solid background despite the completely ridiculous goings-on. Also, the hero says he knew he wanted to marry his sort-of adopted sister since he was eleven. Later he mentions that he's ten years older than her. He wanted to marry a one-year-old???
Unlike, say, Jennifer Crusie or Georgette Heyer, Kinsale doesn't transcend the genre in the sense that I would recommend her, at least going by this book, to people who wouldn't normally read romance or don't have eccentric tastes. Though there's a very interesting loss of virginity scene, most of the sex and romantic scenes are generic and use generic description rather than being particular to the characters. The book also loses momentum at about the four-fifths point, despite a later scene involving sharks, seppuku, and a cursed sword. (The plot elements, in this case, are more fun than the scene is.)
But I liked the way that the heroine's attitudes were of her time rather than ours, the chemistry between her and the hero, the sheer weirdness of the story, and the cast of likable supporting characters.
So, you readers of genre romance, is this sort of plotting actually more common than I realize, or were readers across the country picking up the book and saying "What the hell...?" Also, does the genre ever have interracial romances other than those between white women and Native Americans?
While reading it, I tried to figure out if its aura of surpassing weirdness was solely because it was a genre romance with plot elements that (I assume) do not normally appear in the genre, or if it would have been peculiar no matter what genre it had been written for. But I was unable to think of any genre that might normally feature a blonde ninja in recovery from childhood sexual abuse who was trained by a Japanese butler in Hawaii in the late 1860s and is nicknamed Mano Kane (Man Shark)-- there's a long o which I can't reproduce here, but Kinsale uses a bar over the o, which makes it even crazier, though I can't explain why.
The closest match would be Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise series, but those are set in the present day and would not have had an excruciatingly proper heroine whose highest ambition is to become a typist, doesn't know what sex is, and gets saddled with someone else's baby. Though I could certainly see O'Donnell writing the scene where she smuggles a sword out of a sleazy boarding house (where the ninja had previously climbed up into the rafters to hide it, _after_ she had accidentally broken his leg with her sewing machine) by hiding it up her voluminous skirts.
One of the things which makes this book even odder is that Kinsale appears to have meticulously researched everything, even the Japanese and ninja stuff, so there's a sense of solid background despite the completely ridiculous goings-on. Also, the hero says he knew he wanted to marry his sort-of adopted sister since he was eleven. Later he mentions that he's ten years older than her. He wanted to marry a one-year-old???
Unlike, say, Jennifer Crusie or Georgette Heyer, Kinsale doesn't transcend the genre in the sense that I would recommend her, at least going by this book, to people who wouldn't normally read romance or don't have eccentric tastes. Though there's a very interesting loss of virginity scene, most of the sex and romantic scenes are generic and use generic description rather than being particular to the characters. The book also loses momentum at about the four-fifths point, despite a later scene involving sharks, seppuku, and a cursed sword. (The plot elements, in this case, are more fun than the scene is.)
But I liked the way that the heroine's attitudes were of her time rather than ours, the chemistry between her and the hero, the sheer weirdness of the story, and the cast of likable supporting characters.
So, you readers of genre romance, is this sort of plotting actually more common than I realize, or were readers across the country picking up the book and saying "What the hell...?" Also, does the genre ever have interracial romances other than those between white women and Native Americans?
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
I had wondered about the interracial romance thing myself after looking at a few category romance covers, not that cover art is necessarily indicative. (I hope.)
From:
no subject
There is, BTW, a sort-of sequel about the daughter of these two, in which the hero is a former naval officer with PTSD and which features simulated sex while shipwrecked on a south Atlantic island. There's also the one with the Irish telepath and the half-sidhe earl, which ultimately ends up being about the uprising of 1797, and the one with the Regency-era absent-minded inventor, and the one ith the medieval knight and the rennaissance Italian lady with the chapter in alliterative verse (set as prose).
---L.
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Okay, that does look a little weird.
---L.
From:
no subject
You know, my instant delight with Flatland when I tracked it down four years after a teacher mentioned it should've suggested to me that I was going to do mathy things later in life, it really should've.
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
What is first, out of curiosity? :-)
I've done mathematician heroine, but in not-at-all-romantic contexts. Sigh.
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
Are you sure that's connected? I'll have to check when I get home. There's a *prequel* to The Shadow and the Star, which is called The Hidden Heart and features Catherine's parents and has the first appearance of Samuel; it's pretty good genre romance, but it's not Kinsale at her best.
The one with penguins, PTSD, and a Ruritanian princess is Seize the Fire. The one about the Irish telepath and the Sidhe is Uncertain Magic; the one with the inventor is Midsummer Moon; the first medieval is For My Lady's Heart with recent sequel Shadowheart. The Prince of Midnight has a hero with vertigo; I don't like it much, but it's popular. My Sweet Folly has one of the best epistolary prologues ever, but unfortunately goes downhill from there. The Dream Hunter is an alternate history in which Lady Hester Stanhope had a bastard daughter with Michael Bruce, who is raised as an Arab and longs to go to England to be a proper lady.
I would disagree a bit with L's assessment, Rachel; romance novels often have sketchy plotting, but few achieve the complexity and sheer crackheadedness of Kinsale's. It's kind of astonishing when one of her novels has a plot that makes sense, actually. I tend to read her for characterization and emotional impact, not plot.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
You're right that most of Kinsale makes more emotional than logical sense, but that's usually what I read for in Romance. But I've read some fairly bizarre ones. Though come to think of it, the more outré were Kinsale's recommendations, when she was on GEnie's RomEx board. The two nominally British Raj stories I tried were, for my money, the loopiest.
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I don't read a lot of historical romances set in periods other than the Regency era, but this sounds quite atypical. Especially this: "heroine's attitudes were of her time rather than ours." Often in historicals, the heroine does seem rather anachronistic.
And no, interracial romances, even in contemporary romances, are fairly rare.
From:
no subject
I asked about interracial romances because of the oddity of a white ninja, which made me realize that a Japanese ninja would probably not appear as a romantic hero in an American romance novel.
I bet there's an untapped market for contemporary interracial romances, though. I live in LA, which I recently read has the highest percentage of interracial marriages in the country, and most of the people I know date outside of their race. Even people like me who barely date at all. Unless you live in some sort of single-race enclave, it really cuts down on your pool of potential partners if you don't.
From:
no subject
I didn't particularly like this book, but I did very much like The Prince of Midnight (the highway man book) because it has a very tortured heroine and inverts a lot of the standard genre gender roles and expectations. My favorite right now is her new one, Shadowheart, which is probably not for the faint of heart in terms of the sex scenes, which are pretty non-vanilla for the romance genre.
From:
no subject
Frankly, even in Crusie, whom I've been adoring so far, I tended to skim the sex scenes (for non-sex-related dialogue, insofar as one can sieve out such things) because they bored me vaguely. Yeah, I'm weird.
From:
no subject
One of the big reasons why I like Shadowheart is because the sex scenes are so absolutely necessary to the character development.
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
---L.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject